ABC Open South West Victoria

Hot stuff from the cold South

I'll start off with a few personal highlights from this year. The first occurred in May and was moving to Warrnambool.

What a town! I've lived in a number of Australian regional towns and I feel confident in saying Warrnambool is incredibly vibrant, friendly, beautiful and lively. The second was a brand new nephew, Big Ted we call him, and the third is Pepper, pictured above.

She's a 6-month old Maremma, yep one of those dogs who look after the penguins on Middle Island. I saved her from an inner-city backyard.

In the wintry weather of Warrnaambool I am jealous of her, being a cloud doona with legs.

Now to the real highlights; Drum roll please...

One of the first people to touch base with me after I clambered out of my dusty 4WD, bought a new wardrobe of woollen garments and planted myself in my new cupboard-sized Warrnambool ABC office was the remarkable James Pevitt. James is known and loved around Port Fairy and surrounds as being an epic adventure surfer, a wonderful travel photographer and a well-behaved larrikin who suffers his recent diagnosis of MS with silence and courage.

That said, he contributes to ABC Open in the form of words, not pictures, and shared this wonderful travel tale about Captain Keith and his Camping Trip on Water with us, which his best mate Fuzzperformed for radio. Fuzz has never done a story read before but his performance was perfect, fueled no doubt by loyalty and love for his best mate. I later bought a beginners surfboard off Fuzz, thanks mate! I'm yet to master the green room. And the lingo... just trying to 'dial it up'.

I digress.

In August, Camperdown local Annie Thornton made her first film, a video postcard, which was played on News 24 and that same night premiered at the 'local' in Camperdown, infamously delaying the meat raffle and forcing the big TV screen to be switched away from the horse racing for the first time in history.

How do I know this? Well, Annie is in fact a brilliant and comedic writer, I read her guest blog about the night and you too can read about her premier here. If you need any proof of Annie's talents, she recently wrote this hilarious story for the 500 Words them 'One Moment This Year' and since being featured on our ABC News Facebook page it has been read by over 600 people! Read it and laugh!

Dan Rondeau of Bec & The Big River Trio fame also came along to that workshop, producing a bit of light humour for his young son titled Good Windmill Hunting. I am so glad I have arrived in a new town full of people who get the cosmic joke; that humour has a place pretty much everywhere.

If it wasn't for the lovely Sara Napier, who helped me get that Video Postcard workshop going and dragged Annie along, none of these fantastic stories would have ever been heard. Sara iced the cake by making her own beautiful film about the picturesque Timboon, you can watch that here.

And then the whales came.

And when the whales came, local film maker Colleen Hughson began trying to capture video footage of those whales. The whales arrived in June with the birth of two calves down at Logan's Beach, pictured here. Colleen began filming her profile of local whale enthusiast Pete a few weeks later, for our My Crazy Passion project. You'd think with 16 whales in the bay at any given time it might have been easy to get that 'money shot'...

Not so.

Luck was not on Colleen's side, and she is not one to accept second best so she was out there for hours and hours and hours filming the motionless blue ocean, for weeks! I often saw her ride there with child, tripod and huge video camera in tow, in every kind of weather that Antarctica delivered to our shores. Every time she left after a day of filming sleepy whales, a friend would text saying "get down here! Whale just breached 5 times, where ARE you???" In the end she enlisted the assistance of husband Luke who also became a regular landmark down at Logan's lookout, and suffered ghastly conditions for the love of his creative, persistent woman... or was it just that he caught the passion too?

In the end, Colleen got what she wanted and produced Pete: Whale Tracker, a gorgeous profile of a man who has long deserved his day in the virtual sun. She also made a 15-minute version which was screened at the Upwelling Festival in Portland, to great acclaim.

For me it has been a year of hard work, adjustments and meeting dozen upon dozen of new friendly faces, but I must say that the most fun I have had so far was enticing all of these good people at the Natimuk Frinj festival get down and boogie boogie boogie for our collaborative freedance video.

There is talk of doing something like this at the Laneways Festival in Warrnambool next year, so get your cameras out and dancing shoes on! I will need volunteer camera people and many boogiers to pull that off again!

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Comments

Debbie Mazurek

Thanks Emily for all your inspiration, care and patience and amazing work with all of us new and old warrnamboolites! Look forward to following and being involved with more :)

MARGARET HARRIS

What a beautiful dog and a great photo.

fran

Hi Emily thanks for all the great story's . I come from Warrnambool and now live in north Queensland . so flipping to your site keeps me up to date with all things from home . so thanks for keeping me homesick :) fran